As assessment of
children’s reading abilities becomes of more concern to teachers, the use of
informal reading inventories has become of interest to researchers and policy
makers alike (Paris & Carpenter, 2003; Paris, Paris, & Carpenter, 2001;
Paris & Hoffman, 2004). The use of the IRI has been suggested for assessing
children’s oral reading rate, accuracy of decoding, fluency, comprehension, and
retelling (Paris, Paris, & Carpenter, 2001; Tompkins, 2003). Although the
content of these inventories varies, virtually all contain graded word lists in
some form (Cooper & Kiger, 2005).

Graded word lists can be
used for various purposes. According to Richek, Caldwell, Jennings, and Learner
(1996), a student’s performance on word lists can provide important diagnostic
information about word recognition abilities. (p. 50) Tompkins (2003) states
that students read the lists until they reach a point that is too difficult for
them indicating the level at which the graded passages are begun (p. 80).
Bader (2002) states, “...a graded word list may be used as a starting point in
administering graded reading passages or to gain additional insight into the types
of word recognition errors made.” (p. 20).

Accordingly, the purpose
of this paper is to describe the similarities and differences between words
included in the graded lists on six different informal reading inventories
published after 2001 through a formal lexical analysis. This analysis seeks to
describe how the word lists differ in length of words, inclusion of words at
multiple levels, and the words that appear on different inventories.

Development of Word
Lists in Informal Reading Inventories

Without question, the
learning of words from lists is a staple of early reading instruction.
Beginning with Thorndike in 1921 to Dolch in 1932, these lists of words have
been used for both instruction and assessment (Kauffman, 2000). According to
McCormick (2003), informal inventory word lists are generally used for two
purposes: 1) to determine the level of passages to be read in oral reading
assessment, and 2) to provide information about the student’s ability to decode
words in isolation without the context of phrases and sentences (p. 96).

Among the various
informal inventories reviewed there is not consistency in reporting how word
lists are developed. Some authors of inventories used in this study carefully
describe the process by which the word lists in the inventories were composed.
For example, Johns (2001) provides an in depth explanation of how the 20 word
lists in the Basic Reading Inventory were constructed. His word lists were
derived in part from the EDL Core Vocabularies and Basic Skills Work List: Grades
1-12 (pp. 112-117). The usability of the lists was also assessed in a pilot
study described in the manual. Leslie and Caldwell (200) state that the sight
words that comprise the QRI-3 lists came from the passages and were checked for
readability level using the Standard Frequency Index (p. 414).

On the other hand, other
authors provide little of no technical information about the development of the
word lists in their assessments. This was the case with the Classroom Reading
Inventory, Ninth Edition (Silvaroli & Wheelock, 2001). In the appendix of
their inventory, Woods and Moe (2003) provide information on the development of
the passages but not the word lists (pp. 263-268). Bader (2002) indicated the
use of graded word lists (unspecified) and “readers that appeared to be
appropriate to each level” (p.159). Bader further reported that a comparison of
her word lists to the Slosson Oral Reading Test and found a correlation of 0.92
(p. 159).

Method

Six informal inventories
were selected for analysis based on year of publication and inclusion of word
lists between Pre-Primer (PP) and grade 6. If an inventory included word lists
for grades seven and eight, these were not used in the analysis. The
inventories selected for this study were the Critical Reading
Inventory (Applegate, Quinn, & Applegate, 2004), the Bader Reading and
Language Inventory (Bader, 2002), the Basic Reading Inventory (Johns,
2001), the Qualitative Reading Inventory (Leslie & Caldwell’s 2001),
the Classroom Reading Inventory (Silvaroli &Wheelock, 2001), and the
Analytical Reading Inventory (Woods & Moe, 2003).

To prepare the lists for
analysis, each sight word list (grades PP-6) was entered into an Excel
spreadsheet. This enabled the investigator to alphabetize the lists for review,
and to count the letters of each word as well as to determine average length of
words per grade. Each list was coded according to grade level and inventory
title. This allowed the investigator to compare the lists more easily. To frame
the analysis in this study, the author was informed by the work of Hiebert and
Martin (2004). In their discussion of children’s word learning they
differentiate between uniqueness in highly meaningful words, highly regular
words, and high frequency words. Of particular interest were the identification
of unique words--words that appeared only in one inventory list--and the
identification of duplicated words--words that appeared on more than one
inventory list. Further, among the identified duplicated words, the investigation
sought to identify at what grade levels these words appeared. Finally, the
corpus of unique words was compared to the original 220-word Dolch List (1945) to
ascertain what percentage of this list was used in the inventory lists
evaluated.

Results

The first step in
the analysis was to count the total number of words used at each grade level
across the six different inventories. Next, at each grade level, duplicate
words were removed from the total count to determine the number of unique
words. As defined here, an unique word would be one that appears on only one
inventory. These results are presented in Table 1 below:

Table 1. Total number of words and
total number of unique words by grade level.

Grade
Level

Total
Words

Unique
Words

Percentage
of Unique Words

Pre-Primer

184

104

56.52%

Primer

250

157

62.80%

One

272

200

73.53%

Two

268

234

87.31%

Three

272

258

94.85%

Four

269

253

94.05%

Five

270

255

94.44%

Six

266

258

96.99%

TOTAL

2051

1719

83.81%

As may be
expected, the six inventories use many of the same words at the beginning grade
levels. From grade three and higher, the inventories show virtually no overlap
in word selection. Duplicated words were evaluated in two ways. First, the
goal was to compare individual words across grade levels. This analysis looked
at the words that appeared on more than one inventory at the same grade; for
example, appearing at grade three on two different inventories. In all, 242
words were identified (See Appendix A). This is approximately 14% of the words
identified. At the lower levels, a set of four words--he, the, saw, went--appeared
on all six inventories

The next step in
the analysis was to identify words that appeared on more than one list, but at
different grade levels. In all, 175 individual words were identified that were
present on more than one grade level list (See Appendix B). This represents a
little more than 10% of the words reviewed. The most extreme example was the
word “morning.” This word appeared on five different inventories. At the
lowest, this word was included on a pre-primer list. At the highest, it was
included on a grade 4 list.

Next, using the
average length of words was evaluated using only unique words. The results of
this analysis are shown in Table 2 below:

Table 2. Total number of unique words and average length by grade level.

Grade
Level

Unique
Words

Percentage
of Unique Words

Pre-Primer

104

3.60

Primer

157

3.95

One

200

4.50

Two

234

5.09

Three

258

5.84

Four

253

6.66

Five

255

7.03

Six

258

7.94

As illustrated in Table 2, the
length of the words increases by grade level. Word length is one indicator of
linguistic complexity. Ability to read longer words has been correlated to
spelling achievement and recognition of contextual vocabulary (Fry, 1977).

The final level of
analysis was to compare the words on the inventories to the original list by Dolch
(1945). There are 220 words on the standard Dolch List. Roughly 78%, or 171
of these words were included on one or more of the inventories evaluated (See
Appendix C). As would be expected, many of these appeared in the first three
grades. Of the words that appeared at more than one level, 41% came from the
Dolch List.

Discussion

The purpose of the present study was
to compare word lists from six representative informal reading inventories.
The lists were compared based on uniqueness of the words selected by the
inventory authors, the average lengths of the words, placement of the words on
more than one grade level, and inclusion of Dolch words. As reported, the
following summarizes the findings of the analysis:

1. There was
more duplication of word selection at the lower grade levels. Given the
finding that 78% of words included in the Dolch list were identified, this
finding makes sense. The Dolch list is designed for readers below grade 3.

2. The average
length of words included on the lists increases with grade level. Since word
length is a factor in many readability formulas, this also appears to be a
predicted finding.

3. More unique
words are identified in the upper grades. As previously stated, the inclusion
of words from the Dolch list at the lower level accounts for the duplication of
words at these levels. Accordingly, in the upper grades (three and higher),
the lists appear to be more unique.

4. A relatively
low percentage of words were found on more than one grade level—a little more
than 10%.

5. The Dolch
list is highly represented. 78% of the words on the Dolch list were included
in one or more of the word lists. Of the duplicated words, 41% came from the
Dolch list.

Informal reading
inventories (IRIs) are a staple component in reading assessment. Each is
unique based on their individual word lists, reading passages, and other types
of informal assessment protocols. As a result of this investigation, one
should question whether informal inventories are interchangeable. That is, are
the results on one likely to reliably predict results on another? With regard
to the word lists on the six inventories investigated, the answer is likely to
be “yes and no.” The results of word list reading at the lower grades are more
likely to be reliable across inventories due to the relative high degree of
duplication—especially in regard to Dolch words. On the other hand, due the
high number of unique words at the higher grade levels, comparing performance
on these lists may be less reliable.

Some may want to use
sight word lists to determine a student’s reading level. There should be
questions about this approach, however. In some IRIs, for instance, students
are simply asked to read lists of words in an untimed condition while in others
words are to be presented in a timed condition. Given this variance, it might
best not to make decisions about reading levels from word lists but instead to
follow the testing procedures of most inventories. In these cases the word
lists are used to determine beginning reading levels for passage reading and to
provide information about a student’s decoding abilities. In not one of the
six inventories investigated did the authors indicate that their word lists
could be used to determine instructional reading levels. (For research findings
in which flashed­ word recognition scores predict instructional reading
levels, see Frye and Trathen [2005] in this volume.)

With regard to
contemporary practice, how should we view these word lists? First, as indicated
above, the word lists function as a critical component of the inventories in
which they are found. Second, they do provide a sampling of words to be used
for assessing word recognition and decoding skills. As such, and as one of
multiple measures, the lists provide practical information. Further, one may
use word lists for initial screening—followed by more formal assessment of
reading skills and strategies. Finally, in the words of Dolch (1945), “if a
child has difficulty in recognizing common words, it is a good thing to
discover how many he knows of the 220 words which make up about two-thirds of
easy school reading material” (p. 101). This kind of information is not
insignificant—and maybe everything old is truly new again.

Paris, S. G., & Hoffman, J. V. (2004). Reading
assessments in kindergarten through third grade: Findings from the center for
the improvement of early reading achievement. The Elementary School Journal,
105(2), 199-218.